Shopify moves back to Native from React Native
Shopify is transitioning its mobile development strategy from React Native back to native Swift and Kotlin. The company cites the increased capability of AI coding agents as the primary reason for this shift.
Why it matters
This highlights a significant trend where AI-assisted coding is reducing the cost of maintaining separate native codebases, challenging the dominance of cross-platform frameworks.
Coding agents changed what it costs to build mobile apps twice. Here’s why Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin.
We decided to go all-in on React Native back in 2020, and that bet has been extremely successful. We saved a ton of time building features just once, enabled developers with no mobile background to contribute to our apps, and freed ourselves from constantly chasing feature parity.
In January 2025, I wrote that the future of React Native was bright and that Shopify planned to keep investing in it. That was true based on what we knew then. React Native was working well for us, and it remains an excellent framework. But since then, coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to.
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